We told Max about the resident mouse in the house, and on Sunday (after attending church services next door) he took us to Dollar General to buy cleaning supplies and mousetraps. He bought bleach, scrub pads and toilet bowl cleaner. We supplied some pieces of old cheddar cheese and Max set the mousetraps before he left. We didn’t have to wait long. Within two hours – snap!… went the mousetrap. We disposed of the mouse immediately, leaving all the other traps out – certain that we’d be catching more. But as it turned out, there was only one very happy mouse making a lot of mess.
Once the mouse was out of the picture, Chelsea settled in to clean the house thoroughly – starting with the kitchen. The whole project took 30 hours over several weeks! All the food in the kitchen was 2-10 years over the expiry date. Flour stored in an old ice cream bucket had 3 layers of colors. Packaged foods were well past their expiration dates. Even the sodas had gone bad. The mouse had made several nests in one of the drawers, and left droppings everywhere in the cupboards. In addition to the expired food and mouse droppings, there were cockroach feces everywhere – on the counters, in the drawers, in the cupboards, on the floor. Chelsea bleached every drawer and every shelf, wiped all the contents down with bleach water, threw out all the expired food and mouse-chewed things (we filled several 50 gallon trash cans), and washed every dish in the kitchen.
Having completed that task, Chelsea and I both tackled the refrigerator. We washed every shelf and drawer, scrubbing out the inside of the refrigerator with bleach water. The refrigerator was not keeping the food cold. The food in the freezer had gone bad, as had most of the food in the main part. We tossed everything that was bad, saved everything that wasn’t, and put everything back into the newly cleaned refrigerator.
Max got a repairman out, who unblocked the fan and said the refrigerator should start getting colder. After a few days, our food still wasn’t staying cold enough so we let Max know. Talk about amazing response times! The very next morning we were rousted out of bed at an ungodly hour 🙂 by a sharp rapping on the door. It was Max, letting us know that we’d be getting a refrigerator delivered in about an hour. Sure enough, the truck pulled up to the front and the two guys rolled out a brand new, black refrigerator.
Chelsea scavenged the new light bulbs that we’d just put into the old refrigerator, while I quickly cleaned the dirty floor, just in time to roll the new refrigerator into place. We were thrilled! We adjusted the settings, putting our food into the brand new beauty. Finally alone, we danced around in celebration, high-fiving each other repeatedly… :).
The final kitchen project was getting the stove working. Chelsea cleaned out ripped up insulation, extensive mouse droppings, and incinerated food. After cleaning and jiggling various stove parts, we finally ended up with three working stove burners.
Since the house hadn’t been used lately, except as a youth activities house for a while, it ended up being a receptacle for donated discards from people. No one does anything with the things that get put here – they don’t throw away the items that aren’t usable, or the couch that smells like dog, or the furniture that’s falling apart, and they don’t set the rooms up in any particular way either. Everything pretty much got left in the main room.
Our first step was to rearrange the furniture into some semblance of order. We moved an old TV from the living room floor into the back room on a shelf; we righted a cabinet and moved it against a wall to use as a work area; we moved several file cabinets together, using one as an end table for one of the couches. We got rid of a chair that had been another home for the resident mouse. Ripped and torn, it was now spilling its insides out. Mouse droppings left an awesome trail when we turned the chair over to move it. We took down the ping-pong table that dominated the living room/ entry area, and moved a small table to put by the door for everything that goes in and out with us. We sorted and tossed old newspapers and filed paperwork in the cabinets. We replaced burned out light bulbs. We vacuumed the entire house.
In the bedroom we organized the cots that were piled around and moved them to a back closet, after cleaning out the closet. We moved on to clean out almost all of the remaining closets in the house. We laundered everything we found that was salvageable and put it away in cabinets. The pantry was a real mess – boxes were thrown in helter skelter, and the mouse and cockroaches had been having a field day. Picture a big mouse cage that hasn’t had the floor papers cleaned in many months, and you’ll have an idea of the floor in the pantry. After talking to several people in the church, we were able to throw out much of the junk, but we never did finish. We would have had to take out all the remaining boxes and empty out everything one by one, sorting and laundering, and we weren’t up for that. I did move them around as much as I could and swept and vacuumed everything I could reach.
We have set up Rosemary’s laptop on a big worktable, and when Chelsea’s laptop arrived, we got another table like it to use for hers. We were thrilled when we found out there’s wireless Internet here! The couches are in terrible condition – the springs are totally sprung, and two of the three smell like animal urine in some spots, and they are quite dirty. When we vacuumed the entire house, we found solid lines of mouse doo-doo underneath the cushions in two couches. Chelsea also vacuumed up a great deal of animal hair from one of the couches.
There’s only one table lamp in the whole house, so at night we tend to congregate right next to it, trading off for who gets to sit next to the light and table. The kitchen has an absolute minimum of utensils and dishware, so we are using our own things, and we are using our own towels for both kitchen and bath. There are no beds so we sleep on the floor with our sleeping pads. It’s a very stripped down existence – minimalist everything, and funky furniture, with no decorations of any kind. We hung our little stained glass angel that Russ and Paul gave us, and we loved that.
On the upside, the house has a beautiful wood floor in the front room and in our bedroom, and has lots of big windows in every room so there is wonderful natural light. The house is spacious and has two bathrooms. Though the house is old, it’s been pretty well maintained over the years, and the bathrooms and kitchen have been updated. We love the chance to be in another room from each other occasionally (unlike the tent) and we love the convenience of two bathrooms! It’s been just unbelievable to us to have so much “privacy”, and to have central air conditioning. We have a funky TV and DVD that work great to watch our DVDs, and we can roll our bikes right in the front door and have them out of the way but easily accessible.
Not the least of what we love is the location – we are right on Main St, only a block from the post office, about a third of a mile from the grocery store, and only about 2-3 blocks from everything else. After all of our cleaning and setting up, and even though it’s pretty minimalist, the whole house feels alive, lived in, functional, and homey. We’re in love.